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In bronze League I see a lot of TvP stalker spam. In early game situations would it be better to simply have more Marauders or more marines does it change depending on whether or not I have stim? According to the game's help section Marauders are supposed to counter stalker spam, but it just seems like the spam rips them apart either way.

When expanding should the first thing you produce be the orbital comm upgrade assuming it's in a safe low risk place? Is the mule drop worth more than the amount of SCVs you can produce during the upgrade time?

I see hellions being used a lot against zerg. What makes them so appealing? Assuming I start off with dual rax 1 lab one reactor and expansion, what makes them more appealing then going air harass by banshees+ cloak/medevac.

Relatively which faction expands the fastest and which the slowest?

In regards to Medevac drops, is it better to drop say only marines against zerg and 4 marines and 2 Marauders against protoss?

I see that Medevacs are sometimes used simply as support healers during a battle. How much of a combat multiplier is this? Can Two Medvacs heal one unit?

Just how situational are Reapers? I often forgo them in favor of either banshees or air drops. Apart from that, it seems like most of the ladder maps are made so that Reaper base entry is a relatively slow and unprotected path. Even some of the first expansions make them seem really useless.

What is the point of getting the concussive shells? Is it simply to help chase and kiting?

How do you judge when to stim? When on offense do we stim before engagement to run in? Should we selective stim in certain situations. Ex early stalker spam, stim only Marauders.

I hear from people that Battle Cruisers are underpowered, is this true? I find them useful in some of my games. Although looking back at those games, i had vast reserves of resources.

What is a good way to set and control tempo?

Against Mutalisk spam, what are some good alternatives to the Thor? It seems rather odd that this cheap spam able unit requires such an expensive and late game counter.

Can somebody explain the practical uses for the Raven? Apart from being a detector I don't find very much use for this unit. How do the two turrets work? Does the seeker rocket help against Mutalisk spams? Does the energy Regen make constant use of it's abilities viable? What exactly does the point defense drone help out with? How many missiles does the point defense drone deal with?

For most of these questions, I will be referring to FilterSC's tutorial.

In these 'early game situations' with many stalkers, if you follow FilterSC's build, you'll have a bunker that will nearly be impenetrable due to mass repair. You will be very safe with this.

Orbital Commands are ABSOLUTELY desired. Your first mule will catch you up, and every mule beyond then is profit.

The appeal of hellions is that a big enough pack of them (that is micro'd) has excellent map control. This is controlling the towers, seeing whats going on due to their speed, and able to fry lings or drones.

Zerg is the most likely to have the earliest expansion

The composition of your drop depends what you're trying to achieve (killing buildings or killing workers). however, don't worry about that at all just yet!

One medivac heals one unit

Early reapers, or a speedupgrade rush on 3-4 reapers, do have potential to do very good damage. However, it requires you to micro and NOT slip on your macro (otherwise, you may do damage to him, but you're not doing what you need to so you can be ahead)

Concussive shells are for kiting and slowing the speed of units coming towards you, or trying to escape. They don't have a huge visible effect during large battles, but before or after a battle, you can see.

Stim should be active when your units can get the most benefit out of it. Generally, right before an engagement is good enough.

Every player will have a different on every unit being overpowered or underpowered. Use what you need to.

Tempo of what?

Making a few turrets protecting your mineral line + ~8 marines will make you very safe from mutalisks

The Raven is Terran's mobile detector. It has spells beneficial, but is micro intensive. Point Defense Drone shoots down enemy attacks classified as projectiles (Stalker's laser, mutalisk's worm, vikings missile, etc), until it runs out of energy. The autoturret serves as a slightly beefier dps unit that can attack air and ground. To even afford them you need to have a solid economy. Don't worry about them, YET!

I stress again, follow FilterSCs tutorial, ESPECIALLY the bronze one. Watch it all, remember EVERYTHING he has to say, watch his demonstration of the bronze 10min benchmark, and practice it until you NAIL it.

No player improves until his mechanics improve (always producing workers, always producing units, never getting supply blocked). Leagues are separated by players' ability to do this. With Terran especially, it is important to focus on NAILING these ASAP!

If you have any q's respond here, PM, or hit me up on bnet, DeltaX.275

Agreed about FilterSC, as a beginner I'd say it would be more helpful to follow a specific build and experiment with tweaks as evolutions from that build (rather than jump right into the minutiae of BCs and Ravens).

Against Mutalisk spam, what are some good alternatives to the Thor? It seems rather odd that this cheap spam able unit requires such an expensive and late game counter.

Marines, lots of turrets, or ravens. Although vikings can work, you need to get them out in real numbers.

Can somebody explain the practical uses for the Raven?

I go mass ravens all the time. For example against Zerg I do hellion/banshee, into raven. Against Terran, marine/tank into marine/raven. Works like a charm.

Seeker missile is REALLY frickin powerful. Especially in numbers. You can easily kill whole groups, almost instantly, with them. Mutas are perfect, but I also use them on banelings, siege tanks, marines, roaches, hydralisks, and sometimes even Thors and Ultralisks (although I wouldn't advise it).

They are also a must in late-game TvT, if you go SkyTerran. The PDDs help to swing the battle more your way, by blocking viking/BC fire. You can also pound their viking army with seeker missiles.

In regards to the auto-turret, there are two main advantages. First with lots of ravens, you can spam loads. Second, you can run away, the moment they are dropped.

This means you can fly straight into an expansion, drop turrets, then fly straight onto the main, to drop more. No sitting there killing drones, no scanning ahead to check if your opponent is heading to you, just drop turrets, and move on.

In small numbers, you can use them to harass single units (like those at watch towers or expansions), and place behind mineral lines. It is possible to clump them together, in a wall, so Zerg cannot get a good surround.

Marauder have slower attack delay but do more damage with each hit, this is ideal for fighting mobile units like stalkers.

Orbital is excellent, each time you mule, you get 270 minerals in total. Consider it a trade off when contemplating using that energy to avoid being supply blocked with Supply Calldown or having unavoidable scouting with Scanner Sweep.

Hellions do bonus damage to light units, such as Zergling, which makes them a great early game counter. Hellions are also epic at destroying workers, especially if the enemy tries to run away and lines them all up for your flames to roast more effectively. get the blue flame upgrade for an insane +10 damage to light units.

any race can expand quickly, depending on how they plan to play, and how they are reacting to the other player. Nearly always a zerg player will expand immediately.

the units you drop with depends on what you want to be attacking, consider the damage type of the units you make, vs the armor type of the units / structures you're going to attack.

medivacs can make your army last much longer, even under heavy fire. if you learn to kite with your bio army, the effectiveness of medivacs goes up significantly. another way to increase medivac influence, is to have more of them of course, so more targets can be healed at one time. each medivac can only heal one target at a time and each target can only be healed by one medivac at a time.

reapers are awesome when micro'd well, they can decimate worker lines and win you the game vs an unprepared or flustered player. do not let your base macro fall behind while paying so much attention to the micro of your strike force.

conc shells are great in nearly all situations vs anything. it makes retreating easier, it makes it harder for the enemy to retreat, it essentially can force an engagement or deny a portion of their retreat.

stim when you're about to attack. if you have medics with your army, stim, wait two seconds for the heal to bring them to full, then run into position for the attack. if there is a drop in your main and your army is out of position, you dont need to stim your entire bio force, only stim enough to deal with the drop. if your army is in combat, always use stim. stim is amazing.

bc are expensive, take a while to build, are countered by corruptor / voidray / stalker / viking. however, their yamato is awesome at destroying key targets quickly, such as an expansion itself, ultralisk, corruptor, thor, bc, colossus, voidray, carrier, mothership, all of these are enemies with more than or nearly 300 hp.

to maintain tempo, start attacking asap to try and make your opponent be in a reactionary state, so they cannot effectively do the build they want to do to you. keep attacking as frequently as you can. even if its two medivacs with marines that are dropped on his xpo or main, or a pack of reapers that hit the back while your army is in front keeping him from moving out. generally, whoever is the most aggressive player sets the tempo.

thors are not that far away to get, considering how long it takes for Z to get muta out. alternatively, make a turret in your mineral line and be FAST about selecting your scv's to repair it. if you are quick, the muta will not be able to break it. another version would be to make a bunker and put marines in it, near your minerals, with the same scv quickness on repair to make it work. aid your ability to react to muta play, by using a Sensor Tower, so you can see when muta are rushing into position to attack.

raven is epic, as a spell caster, it is a support unit which enables your army to do more things than they could without it.
Lets say you want to force an engagement at their expo, you see his army is nearby but you want to go in anyway. toss down some PDD and they will shoot down all 'missile' attacks increasing the survivability of your entire army. PDD has no recast delay on its laser, it is only limited by range and its energy. check the tooltip for which attacks it works against.
Seeker missile is awesome vs muta, since it does splash damage, however its hard to use on muta since muta move so quickly and can outrun the range of the SM. SM is also effective vs hydra, since they move so slowly. SM is good vs clumped up Broodlords.
Auto turrets are great for helping you hold a position on the map from small scouting parties. Auto Turrets are also good at harassing mineral lines. you can attack somewhere, while sending your ravens into his xpo and drop a few AT and not only will his workers die, but they will stick around long enough to do some serious damage to any defending force or even the base itself. While AT dont move, their duration is excellent. AT cannot be ignored when placed effectively.

Marauders do work vs stalkers. No question about it. If you have stim and conk shell, and the protoss still is going mass stalker, it's perfectly understandable to build more rauders than rines.

Orbitals are the most important thing to do once you expand. Mules mine more than the SCVs produced in the upgrade time.

Hellions are good at controlling the map, preventing the zerg spreading creep everywhere, preventing lings on the watchtowers, etc. Also, if the zerg is unprepared and was very greedy, hellions can do a ton of damage to a mineral line.

I'd say it's slowest for protoss to expand. There are very few situations in which a nexus first is okay, where there are more in which a hatch first or CC first are fine. Zerg generally expands the fastest, if a zerg doesn't have a natural, he can't produce fast enough.

I don't honestly know, I've never thought about it. That logic is sound, but I think it'd be fine to just grab part of your army and drop.

Medivacs are very good units because of their versatility. Medivacs can drop, but drops are situational. The pure healing of the medivac still makes it a good unit. Two medivacs cannot heal a single unit at the same time.

Reapers are very situational. The reaper has really fallen out of the metagame at the moment. You might still be able to suprise the occasional terran or zerg with a reaper harass though.

Concusive shell prevents zealots from being as good, forcing them to take longer to reach your army. It prevents retreats in some cases, and is very good chasing remnents of an army down and killing them. If you get hit by concusive shell, you will die.

Stim when you start fighting. If you don't have medivacs, be a bit careful with your stims. If you do, stim away. The few situations in which you should stim only a selective part of your units is stimming some rauders forward to kill high templar or bait storms, or stimming a marine to run ahead, really.

BCs are amazing units. BCs are also impossible to transition into safely. When your macro slips, it's possible to use that swell of resources to get BCs, but barring that it's extremely difficult to get to them.

I don't actually know what you mean by this.

Mutas are not a cheap spammable unit. Mutas are very expensive, and if a player decides to mass them, it requires 80% of their resources. Thors destroy clumped up mutas, but build missle turrets, and build marines with stim. Those are your two best defenses.

Most people don't find the Raven a useful unit. I do, but that's just me. The autoturret is a simple turret that does damage. It's static D that costs energy and doesn't last forever. The second "turret" is called PDD, and it can shoot projectiles. If a rauder is shooting at a marine, and there's a PDD, the PDD will shoot down the marauder's shots before they hit the marine. It can cancel out any projectile shot, like the muta's attack, the vikings, etc. Hunter seeker missle is a large AOE spell that moves slowly and targets 1 unit.

both marines and marauders are great against stalkers, but for early game and less micro maruaders are better.

orbital command is better, a mule is basically 6 scvs (less when you have a few, more when you have many), either way the OC is definitely worth it, not to mention scans and call downs.

hellions were used as a way to contain the zerg and not let their creep go out of control, and to be greedy in the background while being safe. You don't really need to worry about metagame things like this, since if you open hellions and they decide to 7 roach rush you or something, you're pretty much going to outright lose.

Generally speaking, zerg expands fastest, protoss tends to be the slowest, though the rule for it is that zerg SHOULD be a base ahead to be considered on equal footing or slightly ahead, protoss and terran generally should be on the same number of bases as their opponent, but protoss has the hardest time setting up its expansions.

You shouldn't worry about what specific units to load in a drop, unless you're making your defensive force or main army lacking by doing so (loading up 8 of your 12 total marines or something similar). To answer your question, in terms of pure damage-dealing, marines take the cake, marauders don't have 2x the output that marines have to compensate for the 2 spaces they take up in a medivac. However, a drop of 4 marauders is fully deployed in half the time it takes for 8 marines (obviously). The longer a drop goes on, the more useful marines are, but against only buildings and a fast drop, marauders are slightly more effective.

1 medivac 1 unit, and they really really help. It gets to the point where if you have like 12 medivacs, fungals don't really hurt you anymore. You don't want too many, but once you have a good number, your bio gets a lot more hardy. Don't rush to this number though, make medivacs consistently out of 1 reactored starport and try not to sacrifice the ones that you already have out.

The only time I use reapers is TvT, and even then I don't really commit. There was a pro player named QxC that would make like 8 reapers with speed in a late game TvP scenario and go around his opponent's base killing pylons and gateways with them. I don't know if he still does it.

Concussive shells is great for kiting and chasing. If you know what stutter step is, you'll see how concussive shell helps.

I'd say stim everything, but only when you're sure there's going to be a fight of it (especially if you don't have medivacs out). If you're on the defensive, you'll have to judge it for yourself. On the offensive or for drops, as close to the first shots your units can take, that's when you stim. Something extra that people do is they stim a marine and run him somewhere they need to see, like up a ramp to check for units, or toward a potential hidden expansion, or to check their enemy's siege range.

Cattlebruisers are great when they're 1 - not expected or 2 - en masse with yamato. You don't really need to worry about underpowered and overpowered things though, unit biases will hardly account for why you win/lose games. This goes for the VAST majority of people that play this game - including myself.

Game tempo is mostly dictated by the attacker, the best way to set and control the tempo is to harass, attack, move your army around so that you have control of the map. Dropping, poking in and out of expansions with your army, and making your presence felt (not known, you don't want your enemy to know exactly what you have), is the best way to control the tempo. Against zerg this can be very hard.

Marines are fantastic against mutas, make turrets in your bases (2-3 around each mineral line), with a few marines, and maybe a turret near your factories/barracks to delay for reinforcements. Overreacting against mutas is really bad, but underreacting is potentially fatal, so if you are in doubt, overreact (but please try not to). And for the record, at 100 minerals/100 gas, mutas are most definitely NOT cheap, the reason they aren't in the metagame TvZ much anymore is because they're so ridiculously cost ineffective against terran.

Your confusion is shared by most of the terran community. The raven has a potential use in most matchups, but it's difficult to get to that point. Point defense drones absorb most ranged attacks (up to 20 - I think), anything where you see an object fly through the air and hit your enemy is applicable, except spells (like seeker missile or yamato cannons), so marauders are affected, but not marines. Keep in mind this only works against your opponents, so your drone won't absorb your marauder fire. Seeker is really good against big clumps of anything, mutas maybe a little less because there's the potential to outrun the missile. The turrets are basically instant buildings, and they last a reallllllly long time, they're really only good for when you have an unkindness (5+) of ravens, and you drop them into your opponent's base.

Look at FilterSC's tutorials and at Appollo's new terran tutorials, that'll get you in the mix of how mechanics can be improved and what the "metagame" is like.

To your first point: learn to scout for a 4gate. When you see one coming, build 3 bunkers and then win after the Protoss suicides into them. don't forget to repair the bunkers. This is basically TvP all the way through gold league.

If you're playing Bio, (Marine Marauder style play) always have Marines, SCVs, and Medivacs queued up. Get some Marauders and Vikings to help take down Air and bulkier units. Get Stim, Combat Shield, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET CONCUSSIVE IT DOESN'T COST ANYTHING AND IT SHREDS ANYTHING MELEE. Get 3/3 quick and don't be afraid to take additional bases. One of the great things about Terran is the fact that if you're on 3 bases, and you already have a ton of SCVs, you can take a 4th with just MULEs supporting it and watch your minerals skyrocket. More minerals means more barracks...

As Terran, you want to have good Map Prescence. Drops and poking at exposed bases is extremely helpful, and if you are holding more bases than your opponent, make a shitload of Rax and let the marines stream in. It won't win you the game every time right away, but if you can keep them focused on defense at the front, it can help you make bigger drop plays. One of the great things about Bio is loading up everything in a Medivac and unloading an army in their main.

That's my beggner guide, I hope you can use some of this information, even though they may not be exactly your questions, you may find some of this information at all useful.

Oh, last thing, if you have map control, start building shit right outside their base. They can't move out without you knowing about it. That's the essence of Map Control.